A. Lange & Söhne's Legacy

Here's Why A. Lange & Sohne Is A Watch Name You Need To Remember

If you're not particularly into watches, chances are you haven't heard of too many watch brands -- Rolex, maybe Timex, maybe Omega (if you were actually listening to Daniel Craig in his first outing as Bond, instead of ogling Eva Green, which is what you should have been doing). Inside the still somewhat insular world of serious watch enthusiasts, however, there is a company that punches well above its weight in terms of visibility. It's not because of the number of watches they make -- annual production is a fraction of most of their competitors, and you won't find their watches in most jewelers' windows. The company in question is A. Lange & Söhne, and they earned their reputation, not through alliances with sports teams, or by putting watches on celebrities -- in fact, the company sedulously avoids virtually all the peripheral attention-seeking behavior that's become de rigueur for luxury brands . Instead, they earned it the old-fashioned way, by making the best watches they possibly could, in a little town called Glashütte, in what used to be East Germany.

Glashütte, located in the Free State of Saxony, hard up against the western edge of the Czech Republic, has a population of about 4,700, and if you visit it's easy to get the feeling that 4,699 of them work in the watch business; it has been virtually the only industry there since the mid-1800s. A former silver mining town, Glashütte fell into poverty when the mines were exhausted, and after being occupied by Napoleon's troops and then liberated after his fall, it sank even further into penury until, by the end of the 19th century, less than a hundred homes remained.

That's where A. Lange & Söhne came in -- or, more precisely, Ferdinand Adolph Lange. Born in 1815, Lange (whose father, a gunsmith, came back from the Napoleonic Wars so shell-shocked that his wife left him with their children when Lange was just a boy) was educated in Dresden, where he apprenticed with one Johann Christian Friedrich Gutkaes, a famous Dresden clockmaker. Today, Glashütte is a pleasant 45-minute drive from Dresden, across picturesque farmland and forests, but in the early decades of the 19th century there wasn't even a road and travel was hazardous. (The road connecting Dresden and Glashütte was finally finished in 1852 but even then, the trip was anything but fast; a postal milestone still stands in the Glashütte town center showing travel time to nearby cities by stage-coach and it was half a day's journey to Dresden.) Lange was able to secure the support of the Saxon state government, and established a watchmaking workshop in Glashütte in 1845 -- the forerunner of the company that's called A. Lange & Söhne today.

Unsurprisingly, the stock-in-trade of Glashütte watchmaking was precision timekeeping, and the watches and clocks made there under F. A. Lange's direction were beautifully made: quality was extremely high, with very solid movement construction designed to give several lifetimes of service. German watchmaking in general, and in Glashütte in particular, didn't pursue the thinness that was so often the goal of French-Swiss watchmaking; elegance to the extent it existed in Glashütte watchmaking -- by Lange, and others who joined him there, including Grossmann, Schneider, and Assmann -- was a by-product of precision engineering. While there are exceptions to every generalization, as a rule the Germans liked their watches the way they like their cars: overbuilt, soberly practical, and made to last.

Lange & Söhne went dark at the end of World War II -- watchmaking in Glashütte didn't come to an end but the Glashütte watchmakers saw their business expropriated, and nationalized under a single collective, and Ferdinand A. Lange's descendant, Walter Lange, left Glashütte in 1948. He was not able to return to Glashütte until after the German reunification, but finally, in 1990, he was able -- in partnership with the legendary Günter Blümlein, the chairman of a firm known as LMH, which at the time owned both IWC and Jaeger LeCoultre -- to establish a new company under the family name, and in 1994, A. Lange & Söhne presented its first watches.